SNAPSHOT Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) was born under a night sky, with signs predicting that she was destined for great things. Now grown, Jupiter dreams of the stars but wakes up to the cold reality of a job cleaning toilets and an endless run of bad breaks. Only when Continue Reading
First impressions: Community season 5 (now with re-added Dan Harmon)
Like a great many other Community fans, I persevered through the lacklustre Dan Harmon-less season four, happy to spend any time I could get with the Greendale gang, even if they did feel like rather soulless facsimiles of the wacky, insane and ultimately loveable people I had grown to Continue Reading
Movie review: August Osage County
Families of all stripes and sizes are riven by a multiplicity of fracture lines, a reality made starkly evident in August: Osage County, based on the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play of the same name by Tracy Letts. You would want to hope though that there are not Continue Reading
Return of The Walking Dead: mid-season 4 poster revealed!
With just over a month to go till The Walking Dead shuffles back a-wailin’ and a-moanin’ onto our screens, we are being given a steady stream of what-ifs and maybe and could this character actually die predictions from all over the interweb. While only showrunner Scott M. Gimple, series Continue Reading
Book review: The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg
Would you want to spend an extended amount of time with a morbidly obese daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants from the Chicago suburbs by the name of Edie Middlestein who started eating in childhood to soothe all her existential aches and pains and found herself unable to stop? Or Continue Reading
Movie review: The Hobbit The Desolation of Smaug
There is something akin to high ritual to entering the cinema to see another in Peter Jackson’s sumptuously-realised visions of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. You must suitably prepare yourself for another epically-long journey into the wilds of the lands of the dwarves, the elves, the orcs and of course Gandalf Continue Reading
Movie review: Frozen
It is a rare thing indeed to walk away from any movie feeling utterly besotted and charmed, but Frozen manages this act of animated seduction with aplomb, using a winning combination of an engaging storyline with consequences, heartfelt and funny characters, and songs that fairly demand the movie be Continue Reading
FUTURE ZEITGEIST: Pop culture goodness I am looking forward to in 2014
I love new years! I am most definitely not one of those cynical old souls who reaches New Year’s Eve, harrumphs with Scrooge-like intensity and balefully glares at the next 365 days, convinced they will be just as awful as I imagine them to be. While I am old Continue Reading
LOOK BACK: My 10 favourite TV shows of 2013 (+ 3 I would rather forget)
I remember the simpler days of my youth. One commercial channel, one government channel and you could only watch as many programs as you had waking hours since PVRs were but a distant twinkle in some yet unborn tech head’s eyes (best not to think that one through too Continue Reading
READ BACK: The 4 books + 1 literary article I loved most in 2013
2013 was not exactly a triumph of book reading quantity over quality. Not that any year should be of course since it is not how many books you read that matters as whether the books you do read are beautifully written, enthral and move you in some way and Continue Reading